Sex Important to Older Men? Stop the Presses

Here’s a news flash for you — people like sex. Even older people. Wow, what an astounding insight into human behavior.

I think some people have this conception that older people are somehow, like, not normal. Like they don’t have all the same needs, wants and desires as a younger person does. Like aging itself is some sort of disorder or disease that needs separate studying and understanding.

I’ll let you in on a little secret — most older folks don’t feel their age. Most middle-age folks don’t feel their age. Once you hit 25 or so, many people (most?) seem “stuck in time” in terms of their own self-image and what they imagine others see them as. Most people simply don’t seem to feel their chronological age.

So your grandparents don’t see themselves as 70-somethings. They see themselves as 20- or 30-somethings who just happen to be living in bodies that don’t look as good or work as well as if they really were 20- or 30-something.

One in three men ages 75 to 95 remain sexually active, defined as having had sex at least once in the past year, according a long-running study of 2,783 Australian men published in today’s Annals of Internal Medicine. […]

The results are consistent with earlier research.

Since when has “sexually active” meant having had sex sometime in the past year?? That’s sexually active? For most of us age 60 or younger, that would be considered sexually inactive.

That other note — that this finding isn’t new — is all the more reason to not see this as a headline in any newspaper’s health section. Yet it is and will be, because sex sells.

And sex in older people, ala Betty White, must be just an unthinkable, astounding concept. So people will write about it. Including us.

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About John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Dr. John Grohol is the founder & CEO of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Computers in Human Behavior and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.